Enterprise 2.0

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Some new rules for IT

2010/06/15 in IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

The other week I had a go at capturing the rules of enterprise IT[1]. The starting point was a few of those beery discussions we all have after work, where we came to wonder how the game of enterprise IT was changing. It’s the common refrain of big-to-small, the Sieble to Saleforce.com transition which sees the need for IT services (internal or external) change dramatically. The rules of IT are definitely changing. Now that I’ve had a go at old rules, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what the new rules might be.

As I mentioned before, enterprise IT has historically been seen as an asset management function, a production line for delivering large IT assets into the IT estate and then maintaining them. The rules are the therefore rules of business operations. My attempt at capturing 4 ± 2 rules (with friends) produced the following (in no particular order):

  • Keep the lights on. Much like being a trucker, the trick is to keep the truck rolling (and avoid spending money on tyres). Otherwise known as smooth running applications are the ticket to the strategy table.
  • Save money. Business IT was born as a cost saving exercise (out with the rooms full of people, in with the punch card machines), and most IT business cases are little different.
  • Build what you need. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team building LEO[2] blew their own valve tubes. You couldn’t buy parts of the shelf so you had to make everything. This is still with us in some organisations’ strong desire to build – or at least heavily customise – solutions.
  • Keep the outside outside. We trust whatever’s inside our four walls, while deploying security measures to keep the evil outside. This creates an us (employees) and them (customers, partners, and everyone else) mentality.

Things have changed since these rules were first laid down. From another post of mine on a similar topic[3] (somewhat trimmed and edited):

The recent global financial criss has fundamentally changed the business landscape, with many are even talking about the emergence of a new normal[4]. We’ve also seen the emergence of outsource, offshore, cloud computing, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0 and so much more.

Companies are becoming more focused, while leaning more heavily on partners and services companies (BPO, out-sourcers, consultants, and so on) to cover those areas of the business they don’t want to focus on. We can see this from the global companies who have effectively moved to a franchise model, though to the small end of town where startups are using on-line services such as Amazon S3, rather than building their own internal capabilities.

We’re also seeing more rapid business change: what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The constant value-chain optimisation we’ve been working on since the 70s has finally cumulated in product and regulatory life-cycles that change faster than we can keep up.

Money is also becoming (or has become) more expensive, causing companies and deals to operate with less leverage. This means that there is less capital available for major projects, pushing companies to favour renting over buying, as well as creating a preference for smaller, incremental change over the major business transformation of the past.

And finally, companies are starting to take a truly global outlook and operate as one cohesive business across the globe, rather than as a family of cloned business who operate more-or-less independently in each region.

So what are the new 4 ± 2 rules? They’re not the old rules of asset management. We could argue that they’re the rules of modern manoeuvre warfare[5] (which would allow me to sneak in one of my regular John Boyd references[6]), but that would be have the tail wagging the dog as it’s business, and not IT that has that responsibility.

I think that the new rules cast IT as something like that of a pit crew. IT doesn’t make the parts (though we might lash together something when in a pinch), nor do we steer the car. Our job is to swap the tyres, pump the fuel, and straighten the fender, all in that sliver of time available to us, so that the driver can focus on their race strategy and get back out on track as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, the following seems to be a fair (4 ± 2) minimum set to start with.

  • Timeliness. A late solution is often worse than no solution at all, as you’ve spent the money without realising any benefit. Or, as a wise sage once told me, management is the art of making a timely decision, and then making it work. Where before we could take the time to get it right (after all, the solution will be in the field for a long time and needs to support a lot of people, so better to discover problems early rather than later), now we just need to make sure the solution is good enough in the time available, and has the potential to grow to meet future demand. The large “productionisation” efforts of the past need to be broken into a series of incremental improvements (à la Gmail and the land of perpeputal beta), aligning investment with both opportunity and realised value.
  • Availability. Not just up time, but ensuring that all stakeholders (both in and outside the company, including partners and clients) can get access to the solutions and data they need. There’s little value in a sophisticated knowledge base solution if the sales team can’t use it in the field to answer customer questions in real time. Once they’ve had to fire up the laptop, and the 3G card, and the VPN, the moment has passed and the sale lost. Or worse, forcing them to head back to the bricks and mortar office. As I pointed out the other week, decisions are more important than data[7], and success in this environment means empowering stakeholders to make the best possible decisions by ensuring that the have the data and functions they need, where they need, when they need it, and in a format that make it easy to consume.
  • Agility. Agility means creating an IT estate that meet the challenges we can see coming down the road. It doesn’t mean creating an infinitely flexible IT estate. Every bit of flexibility we create, every flex point we add, comes at a cost. Too much flexibility is a bad thing[8], as it weighs us down. Think of formula one cars: they’re fast and they’re agile (which is why driving them tends to be a young mans game), and they’re very stiff. Agility comes from keeping the weight down and being prepared to act quickly. This means keeping things simple, ensuring that we have minimum set of moving parts required. The F1 crowd might have an eye for detail, such as putting nitrogen[9] in the tyres, but unnecessary moving parts that might reduce reliability or performance are eliminated. Agility is the cross product of weight, speed, reliability and flexibility, and we need to work to get them all into balance.
  • Sustainability. Business is not a sprint (ideally), and this means that cost and reliability remain important factors, but not the only factors. While timeliness, availability and agility might be what drive us forward, we need still need to ensure that IT is still a smooth running operation. The old rules saw cost and reliability as absolutes, and we strived to keep costs as low, and reliability as high, as possible. The new rules see us balancing sustainability with need, accepting (slightly) higher costs or lower reliability to provide a more timely, available or agile solution while still meeting business requirements. (I wonder if I should have called this one “balance”.)

While by no mean complete or definitive, I think that’s a fair set of rules to start the discussion.

References
1. The rules of Enterprise IT @ PEG↑
2. LEO: Lyons Electronic Office. The first business computer. @ Wikipedia↑
3. The IT department we have today is not the IT department we’ll need tomorrow @ PEG↑
4. The new normal @ McKinsey Quarterly↑
5. Maneuver warfare @ Wikipedia↑
6. John Boyd @ Wikipedia↑
7. Decisions are more important than data @ PEG↑
8. Having too much SOA is a bad thing (and what we might do about it) @ PEG↑
9. Understanding the sport: Tyres @ formula1.com↑

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The IT department we have today is not the IT department we’ll need tomorrow

2010/04/21 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

The IT departments many of us work in today (either as an employee or consultant) are often the result of thirty or more years of diligent labour. These departments are designed, optimised even, to create IT estates populated with large, expensive applications. Unfortunately these departments are also looking a lot like dinosaurs: large, slow and altogether unsuited for the the new normal. The challenge is to reconfigure our departments, transforming them from asset management functions into business (or business-technology) optimisation engines. This transformation should be a keen interest for all of us, as it’s going to drive a dramatic change in staffing profiles which will, in turn, effect our own jobs in the no so distant future.

Delivering large IT solutions is a tricky business. They’re big. They’re expensive. And the projects to create them go off the rails more often than we’d like to admit. IT departments have been built to minimise the risks associated with delivering and operating these applications. This means governance, and usually quite a lot of it. Departments which started off as small scale engineering functions soon picked up an administrative layer responsible to the mechanics of governance.

More recently we’ve been confronted with the challenge with managing the dependancies and interactions between IT applications. Initiatives like straight-through processing require us to take a holistic, rather than a pieces-parts, approach, and we’re all dealing with the problem of having one of each application or middleware product, as well as a few we brewed in the back room ourselves. Planning the operation and evolution of the IT estate became more important, and we picked up an enterprise architecture capability to manage the evolution of our IT estate.

It’s common to visualise these various departmental functions and roles as a triangle (or a pyramid, if you prefer). At the bottom we have engineering: the developers and other technical personnel who do the actual work to build and maintain our applications. Next layer up is governance, the project and operational administrators who schedule the work and check that it’s done to spec. Second from the top are the planners, the architects responsible for shaping the work to be done as well as acting as design authority. Capping of the triangle (or pyramid) is the IT leadership team who decide what should be done.

The departmental skills triangle

While specific techniques and technologies might come and go, the overall composition of the triangle has remained the same. From the sixties and seventies through to even quite recently, we’ve staffed our IT departments with many technical doers, a few less administrators, a smaller planning team, and a small IT leadership group. The career path for most of us been a progression from the bottom layers – when we were fresh out of school – to the highest point in the triangle that we can manage.

The emergence of off-shore and outsourcing put a spanner in the works. We all understand the rational: migrate the more junior positions – the positions with the least direct (if any) contact with the business proper – to a cheaper country. Many companies under intense cost pressure broke the triangle in two, keeping the upper planning and decision roles, while pushing the majority of the manage and all the do roles out of the country, or even out of the company.

Our first attempt at out-sourcing

Ignoring whether or not this drive to externalise the lower roles provided the expected savings or not, what it did do is break the career ladder for IT staff. Where does you next generation of senior IT personnel come from if you’ve pushed the lower ranks out of the business? Many companies found themselves with an awkward skills shortage a few years into an outsourcing / off-shore arrangement, as they were no longer able to train or promote senior personnel to replace those who were leaving through natural attrition.

The solution to this was to change how we brake-up the skills triangle; rather than a simple horizontal cut, we took a slice down the side. Retaining a portion of all skills in-house allows companies provide a career path and on the job training for their staff.

A second, improved, go at out-sourcing

A second, improved, go at out-sourcing

Many companies have tweaked this model, adding a bulge in the middle to provide a large enough resource pool to manage both internal projects, as well as those run by out-sourced and off-shore resources.

Factoring in the effort required to manage out-sourced projects

Factoring in the effort required to manage out-sourced projects

This model is now common in a lot of large companies, and it has served us well. However, the world has a funny habit of changing just when you’ve everything working smoothly.

The recent global financial criss has fundamentally changed the business landscape. We are experiencing not merely another turn of the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order. Many are even talking about the emergence of a new normal. The impact this will have on how we run our businesses (and our IT departments) is still being discussed, but we can see the outline of this impact already.

Companies are becoming more focused, while leaning more heavily on partners and services companies (BPO, out-sourcers, consultants, and so on) to cover those areas of the business they don’t want to focus on. We can see this from the global companies who have effectively moved to a franchise model, though to the small end of town where startups are using on-line services such as Amazon S3, rather than building internal capabilities. While this trend might have initially started as a cost saving, most of the benefit is in management time saved, which can then be used to focus on more important issues. We’re all finding that the limiting factor in our business is management time, so being able to hand off the management of less important tasks can help provide that edge you need.

We’re also seeing faster business change: what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The constant value-chain optimisation we’ve been working on since the 70s has finally cumulated in product and regulatory life-cycles that change faster than we can keep up. Nowhere is this more evident than the regulated industries (finance, utilities …), where updates in government regulation has changed from a generational to a quarterly occurrence as governments attempt to use regulation change to steer the economic boat.

Money is also becoming (or has become) more expensive, causing companies and deals to operate with less leverage. This means that there is less capital available for major projects, pushing companies to favour renting over buying, as well as creating a preference for smaller, incremental change over the major business transformation of the past.

And finally, companies are starting to take a truly global outlook and operate as one cohesive business across the globe, rather than as a family of cloned business who operate more-or-less independently in each region.

We can draw a few general conclusions on the potential impact on IT departments of these trends.

  • The increase reliance on partners, the broader partner ecosystem this implies, and an increasingly global approach to business will create more complex operational environments, increasing the importance of planning the IT estate and steering a company’s IT in the right direction.
  • The need to reduce leverage, and free up working capital, is pushing companies toward BPO and SaaS solutions, rather than the traditional on-premisses solutions, where the solution provider is paid per-seat, or might even be only paid a success fee.
  • The need for rapid project turn-around is pushing us toward running large portfolios of small projects, rather than a small number of large projects.
  • A lot of the admin work we used to do is now baked into web delivered solutions (BaseCamp et al).

This will trigger us to break up a the skills triangle in a different way.

A skills/roles triangle for the new normal

A skills/roles triangle for the new normal

While we’ll still take a slice down the side of the triangle, the buldge will move to the ends of the slice, giving it a skinny waist. The more complex operational environment means that we need to beef up planning (though we don’t want to get all dogmatic about our approach, as existing asset-centric IT planning methodologies won’t work in the new normal). A shift to large numbers of small projects (where the projects are potentially more technically complex) means that we’ll beef up our internal delivery capability, providing team leads with more autonomy. The move to smaller projects also means that we can reduce our administration and governance overhead.

We’ll replace some skills with automated (SaaS) solutions. Tools like BaseCamp will enable us to devolve responsibility for reporting and management to the team at the coalface. It will also reduce the need to develop and maintain infrastructure. Cloud technology is a good example of this, as it takes a lot of the tacit knowledge required to manage a fleet of servers and bakes it into software, placing it in the hands of the developers. Rumor has it that that a cloud admin can support 10,000 servers to a more traditional admin’s 500.

And finally, our suppliers act as a layer through the middle, a flex resource for us to call on. They can also provide us with a broader, cross-industry view, of how to best leverage technology.

This thinning out of the middle ranks is part of a trend we’re seeing elsewhere. Web2.0/E2.0/et al are causing organisations to remove knowledge workers — the traditional white collar middle layers of the organisaiton – leaving companies with a strategy/leadership group and task workers.

Update: Andy Mulholland has an interesting build on this post over at the Capgemini CTO blog. I particularly like the Holm service launched by Ford and Microsoft, a service that it’s hard to imagine a traditional IT department fielding.

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The changing role of Government

2009/12/11 in Business-Technology by peg | View Comments

Is Government 2.0 (whichever definition you choose) the ultimate aim of government? Government for the people and by the people. Or are we missing the point? We’re not a collection of individuals but a society where the whole is greater than the parts. Should government’s ultimate aim to be the trusted arbiter, bringing together society so that we can govern together? Rather than be disinterested and governed on, as seems to be the current fashion. In an age when everything is fragmented and we’re all responsible for our own destiny, government is in a unique position to be the body that binds together the life events that bring our society together.

Government 2.0 started with lofty goals: make government more collaborative. As with all definitions though, it seems that the custodians of definitions are swapping goals for means. Pundits are pushing for technology driven definitions, as Government 2.0 would not be possible without technology (but then, neither would my morning up of coffee).

Unfortunately Government 2.0 seems to be in danger of becoming “government as a platform”: GaaP or even GaaS (as it were). Entrepreneurs are calling on the government to open up government data, allowing start-ups to remix data to create new services. FixMyStreet might be interesting, and might even tick many of the right technology boxes, but it’s only a small fragment of what is possible.

GovHack

This approach has resulted in some interesting and worthwhile experiments like GovHack, but it seems to position much of government as a boat anchor to be yanked up with top-down directives rather than as valued members of society who are trying to do what they think is the right thing. You don’t create peace by starting a war, and nor do you create open and collaborative government through top down directives. We can do better.

The history of government has been a progression from government by and for the big man, through to today’s push for government for and by the people. Kings and Queens practiced stand-over tactics, going bust every four to seven years from running too many wars that they could not afford, and then leaning on the population to refill their coffers. The various socialist revolutions pushed the big man (or woman) out and replaced them with a bureaucracy intended to provide the population with the services they need. Each of us contributing in line with ability, and taking in line with need. The challenge (and possibly the unsolvable problem) was finding a way to do this in an economically sustainable fashion.

The start of the modern era saw government as border security and global conglomerate. The government was responsible for negotiating your relationship with the rest of the world, and service provision was out-sourced (selling power stations and rail lines). Passports went from a convenient way of identifying yourself when overseas, to become the tool of choice for governments to control border movements.

Government 2.0 is just the most recent iteration in this ongoing evolution of government. The initial promise: government for the little man, enabled by Web 2.0.

As with Enterprise 2.0, what we’re getting from the application of Web 2.0 to an organisation is not what we expected. For example, Enterprise 2.0 was seen as a way to empower knowledge workers but instead, seems to be resulting in a generation of hollowed out companies where the C-level and task workers at the coal face remain, but knowledge workers have been eliminated. Government 2.0 seems to have devolved into “government as a platform” for similar reasons, driven by a general distrust of government (or, at least, the current government which the other people elected) and a desire to have more influence on how government operates.

Government, The State, has come to be defined as the enemy of the little man. The giant organisation which we are largely powerless against (even though we elected them). Government 2.0 is seen as the can opener which can be used to cut the lid off government. Open up government data for consumption and remixing by entrepreneurs. Provide APIs to make this easy. Let us solve your citizen’s problems.

We’re already seeing problems with trust in on-line commerce due to this sort of fine-grained approach. The rise of online credit card purchases has pull the credit card fraud rate up with it resulting in a raft of counter-measures, from fraud detection through to providing consumers with access to their credit reports. Credit reports which, in the U.S., some providers are using as the basis for questionable tactics which scam and extort money from the public.

Has the pendulum swung too far? Or is it The Quiet American all over again?

Gone are the days where we can claim that “The State” is something that doesn’t involve the citizens. Someone to blame when things go wrong. We need to accept that now, more than ever, we always elect the government we deserve.

Technology has created a level of transparency and accountablility—exhemplified by Obama’s campaign—that are breeding a new generation of public servants. Rather than government for, by or of the people, we getting government with the people.

This is driving a the next generation of government: government as the arbitrator of life events. Helping citizens collaborate together. Making us take responsibility for our own futures. Supporting us when facing challenges.

Business-technology, a term coined by Forrester, is a trend for companies to exploit the synergies between business and technology and create new solutions to old problems. Technology is also enabling a new approach to government. Rather than deliver IT Government alignment to support an old model of government, the current generation of technologies make available a new model which harks back to the platonic ideals.

We’ve come along way from the medieval days when government was (generally) something to be ignored:

  • Government for the man (the kings and queens)
  • Government by the man (we’ll tell you what you need) (each according to their need, each …)
  • Government as a conglomerate (everything you need)
  • Government as a corporation (everything you can afford)

The big idea behind Government 2.0 is, at its nub, government together. Erasing the barriers between citizens, between citizens and the government, helping us to take responsibility for our future, and work together to make our world a better place.

Government 2.0 should not be a platform for entrepreneurs to exploit, but a shared framework to help us live together. Transparent development of policy. Provision (though not necessirly ownership) of shared infrastructure. Support when you need it (helping you find the services you need). Involvement in line with the Greek/Roman ideal (though more inclusive, without exclusions such as women or slaves).

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We need a better definition for “mash-up”

2009/11/24 in Business-Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Worker of the Future, Posterous by peg | View Comments

Mash-up no longer seems to mean was we thought it meant. The term has been claimed by the analysts and platform vendors as short hand for the current collection of hot product features, and no longer represents the goals and benefits of those original mash-ups that drew our interest. If we want to avoid the hype, firmly tying mash-up to the benefits we saw in those first solutions, then we need to reclaim the term, basing its definition on the outcomes those first mash-up solutions delivered, rather than the (fairly) conventional means used to deliver them.

Definitions are a good thing, as they help keep us all on the same page and make conversations easier. However, what often starts our as a powerful concept—with a clear value proposition—is rapidly diluted as the original definition gets pulled in different directions.

Over time, the foundation of a term’s definition moves from the outcome it represents (and the benefits this outcome provides), taking rest on the means which the original outcome was delivered, driven by everyones’ desire to define what they are doing in relation to the current hot topic. Next, the people who consider it to be just a means, often start redefining the meaning to make it more inclusive, while continuing to claim the original benefits. We end up selling the new hype as either means or goals or any half-hearted solution in between – and missing the original outcome nearly completely. 

The original mash-ups were simple things. Pulling together data from two or more sources to create a new consolidated view. Think push-pins on a map. Previously I would have had to access these data sources separately—find, select, remember, find, select correlation, click. With the mash-up this multi-step, and multi-decision workflow is reduced to a single look, select, click. Many decisions became one, and I was no longer forced to remember intermediate steps or data. 

It was this elimination of unnecessary decisions that first attracted many of us to the idea of a mash-up. As TQM, LEAN, et al tell us, unnecessary decisions are a source of errors. If we want to deliver high quality at a low cost (i.e. efficient and effective knowledge workers) then we need to eliminate these decisions. This helps us become more productive by spending a greater proportion of our time on the decisions that really matter, rather than on messy busy work. Fewer decisions also means fewer chances for mistakes.

Since those original mash-up solutions, our definition of mash-up evolved. Todays definitions are founded on the tools and techniques used to deliver a modern web-based GUI. These definitions focus on the technology standards, where the data is processed (client vs. server), standards and APIs, and even mention application architectures used. Rarely do they talk about the outcome delivered, or the benefits this brings.

There’s little difference, for example, between some mashups and a modern portal. We can debate the differences between aggregating data on the client vs. the server, but does it really matter if it doesn’t change the outcome, and the difference is invisible to the user? The same can be said for the use of standards, APIs used, user configuration options, differing solution architectures and so on.

The shift to a feature-function base definition has allowed the product vendors and analysts of seize control of our definition, and apply it to the next generation of products they would like us to buy. This has diluted the term to the point that it seems to cover much of what we’ve been doing for the last decade, and many of the benefits ascribed to the original mash-ups don’t apply to solutions which fit under this new, broader church.

Modern consumer home pages, such as iGoogle and NetVibes for example, do allow us to use desk and screen real estate more effectively–providing a small productivity boost–but they don’t address the root of the problem. Putting two gadgets on a page does little to fuse the data. The user is still required to scan the CRM and order management gadgets separately, fusing the data in their head.  Find, select, remember, find, select correlation, click rather than a single look, select, click.

The gadgets might be visually proximate, but we could do that with two browser windows. Or two green screens side-by-side. The user is still required to look at both, and establish the correlation themselves. The chair might not swivel as much as with old school portlets, but eyeballs still do, and we are still forcing the user to make unnecessary decisions about data correlation. They don’t deliver that eliminate unnecessary decisions outcome that first attracted us to mash-ups.

The gold standard we need to measure potential mash-ups against is the melding of data used to eliminate unnecessary decisions. This might something visual, like push-pins on a map or markup on an x-ray. Or it might cover tabular data, where different cells in the table are sourced from different back-end systems. (Single customer view generated at the user interface.) If we fuse the data, building new gadgets which pull data attributes and function into one consistent view, then we eliminate these decisions. We can even extend this to function, allowing the user to trigger a workflow or process that make sense in the view they are presented, but with no knowledge of what or where implements the workflow.

We need a definition for mash-ups is that captures this outcome. Something like:

A mash-up is a user interface, or user interface element, that melds data and function from multiple sources to create one single, seamless view of a topic, eliminating unnecessary decisions and actions.

This v0.1 definition provides a nice, terse, strong definition for mash-up which we can hang a number of concrete benefits from.

  • More productive knowledge workers. Our knowledge workers only spend time on the decisions that really matter, rather than on messy busy work, making them more productive.
  • More effective knowledge workers. Fewer decisions mean fewer chances for mistakes, reducing the cost of error recovery and rework resulting in more effective knowledge workers.

Posted via email from PEG @ Posterous

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Enterprise Mashups Defined

2009/10/27 in Business-Technology, Posterous by peg | View Comments

Luis Derechin, of JackBe has just published a nice definition of enterprise mashups over at the Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog:

Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

This seems to cover all the bases and should keep most people happy. I’d like it to include something about how the data is integrated to provide a single consolidated and consistent view of the information, as a traditional (but AJAX heavy) portal would probably fall into under the same definition. On the whole it still works for me though.

The most interesting thing, however, is the approach they used. Rather than gather yet another small group of smart people to write yet another manifesto, they took a more democratic route.

The team used a series of games and contests to engage the broader community, largely relegating themselves to a roll of guiding and coordinating the action. The end result were answers to three key questions:

  • What is an Enterprise Mashup?, (the definition from above)
  • How do you do create an Enterprise Mashup?, and
  • Why should an organization care about mashups?’

The answer don’t have the obvious “designed by committee” smell that these things acquire. I particularly like the statement on why to use enterprise mash-ups,

Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.

as it nicely captures the shift to a more use centred approach–something badly needed in enterprise IT.

Often it seems to the be the enterprise IT community that is the most resistant to change in an organisation. Sure, we might like to use the shiny new toys, but don’t you dare change how we go about our business. We’ll tell you what you need and the best way of doing it.

It’s nice to see that an old dog can learn new tricks.

Posted via email from PEG

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Why we can’t keep up

2009/06/22 in Business-Technology by peg | View Comments

We’re struggling to keep up. The pace of business seems to be constantly accelerating. Requirements don’t just slip anymore: they can change completely during the delivery of a solution. And the application we spent the last year nudging over the line into production became instant legacy before we’d even finished. We know intuitively that only a fraction of the benefits written into the business case will be realized. What do we need to do to get back on top of this situation?

We used to operate in a world where applications were delivered on time and on budget. One where the final solution provided a demonstrable competitive advantage to the business. Like SABER, and airline reservation system developed for American Airlines by IBM which was so successful that the rest of the industry was forced to deploy similar solutions (which IBM kindly offered to develop) in response. Or Walmart, who used a data warehouse to drive category leading supply chain excellence, which they leveraged to become the largest retailer in the world. Both of these solutions were billion dollar investments in todays money.

The applications we’ve delivered have revolutionized information distribution both within and between organizations. The wave of data warehouse deployments triggered by Walmart’s success formed the backbone for category management. By providing suppliers with a direct feed from the data warehouse—a view of supply chain state all the way from the factory through to the tills—retailers were able to hand responsibility for transport, shelf-stacking, pricing and even store layout for a product category to their suppliers, resulting in a double digit rises in sales figures.

This ability to rapidly see and act on information has accelerated the pulse of business. What used to take years now takes months. New tools such as Web 2.0 and pervasive mobile communications are starting to convert these months into week.

Take the movie industry for example. Back before the rise of the Internet even bad films could expect a fair run at the box-office, given a star billing and strong PR campaign too attract the punters. However, post Internet, SMS and Twitter, the bad reviews have started flying into punters hands moments after the first screening of a film has started, transmitted directly from the first audience. Where the studios could rely a month or of strong returns, now that run might only last hours.

To compensate, the studios are changing how they take films to market; running more intensive PR campaigns for their lesser offerings, clamping down on leaks, and hoping to make enough money to turn a small profit before word of mouth kicks in. Films are launched, distributed and released to DVD (or even iTunes) in weeks rather than months or years, and studios’ funding, operations and the distribution models are being reconfigured to support the accelerated pace of business.

While the pulse of business has accelerated, enterprise technology’s pulse rate seems to have barely moved. The significant gains we’ve made in technology and methodologies has been traded for the ability to build increasingly complex solutions, the latest being ERP (enterprise resource planning) whose installation in a business is often compared to open heart surgery.

The Diverging Pulse Rates of Business and Technology

This disconnect between the pulse rates of business and enterprise technology is the source of our struggle. John Boyd found his way to the crux of the problem with his work on fighter tactics.

John Boyd—also know as “40 second Boyd”—was a rather interesting bloke. He had a standing bet for 40 dollars that he beat any opponent within 40 seconds in a dog fight. Boyd never lost his bet.

The key to Boyd’s unblemished record was a single insight: that success in rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to orient yourself, decide on, and execute a course of action, faster than the environment (or your competition) is changing. He used his understanding of the current environment—the relative positions, speed and performance envelopes of both planes—to quickly orient himself then select and act on a tactic. By repeatedly taking decisive action faster than his opponent can react, John Boyd’s actions were confusing and unpredictable to his opponent.

We often find ourselves on the back foot, reacting to seemingly chaotic business environment. To overcome this we need to increase the pulse of IT so that we’re operating at a higher pace than the business we support. Tools like LEAN software development have provided us with a partial solution, accelerating the pulse of writing software, but if we want to overcome this challenge then we need to find a new approach to managing IT.

Business, however, doesn’t have a single pulse. Pulse rate varies by industry. It also varies within a business. Back office compliance runs at a slow rate, changing over years as reporting and regulation requirements slowly evolve. Process improvement and operational excellence programs evolve business processes over months or quarters to drive cost out of the business. While customer or knowledge worker facing functionality changes rapidly, possibly even weekly, in response to consumer, marketing or workforce demands.

Aligning technology with business

We can manage each of these pulses separately. Rather than using a single approach to managing technology and treating all business drivers as equals, we can segment the business and select management strategies to match the pulse rate and amplitude of each.

Sales, for example, is often victim of an over zealous CRM (customer relationship management) deployment. In an effort to improve sales performance we’ll decide to role out the latest-greatest CRM solution. The one with the Web 2.0 features and funky cross-sell, up-sell module.

Only of a fraction of the functionality in the new CRM solution is actually new though—the remainder being no different to the existing solution. The need to support 100% of the investment on the benefits provided by a small fraction of the solution’s features dilutes the business case. Soon we find ourselves on the same old roller-coaster ride, with delivery running late,  scope creeping up, the promised benefits becoming more intangible every minute, and we’re struggling to keep up.

There might be an easier way. Take the drugs industry for example. Sales are based on relationships and made via personal calls on doctors. Sales performance is driven by the number of sales calls a representative can manage in a week, and the ability to answer all of a doctor’s questions during a visit (and avoid the need for a follow-up visit to close the sale). It’s not uncommon for tasks unrelated to CRM—simple tasks such as returning to the office to process expenses or find an answer to a question—to consume a disproportionate amount of time. Time that would be better spent closing sales.

One company came up with an interesting approach. To support the sales reps in the field they provided them with the ability to query the team back in the office, answering a clients question without the need to return to head office and then try to get back in their calendar. The solution was to deploy a corporate version of Twitter, connecting the sales rep into the with the call center and all staff using the company portal via a simple text message.

By separating concerns in this way—by managing each appropriately—we can ensure that we are working at a faster pace than the business driver we supporting. By allocating our resources wisely we can set the amplitude of each pulse. Careful management of the cycles will enable us to bring business and technology into alignment.

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The Value of Enterprise Architecture

2009/05/07 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Presentations by peg | View Comments

Is Enterprise Architecture in danger of becoming irrelevant? And if so, what can we do about it?

Presented as part of RMIT’s Master of Technology (Enterprise Architecture) course.

The Value of Enterprise Architecture  

The Value of Enterprise Architecture

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Applications let us differentiate, not!

2009/02/15 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

Being involved in enterprise IT, we tend to think that the applications we build, install and maintain will provide a competitive advantage to the companies we work for.

Take Walmart, for example. During the early 80s, Walmart invested heavily in creating a data warehouse to help it analyze its end-to-end supply chain. The data was used to statically optimize Walmart’s supply chain, creating the most efficient, lowest cost supply chain in the world at the time. Half the savings were passed on to Walmart’s customers, half whet directly to the bottom line, and the rest is history. The IT asset, the data warehouse, enabled Walmart to differentiate, while the investment and time required to develop the data warehouse created a barrier to competition. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work anymore.

Fast forward to the recent past. The market for enterprise applications has grown tremendously since Walmart first brought that data warehouse online. Today, applications providing solutions to most business problems are available from a range of vendors, and at a fraction of the cost required for the first bespoke solutions that blazed the enterprise application trail. Walmart even replaced that original bespoke supply chain data warehouse, which had become something of an expensive albatross, with an off-the-rack solution. How is it possible for enterprise applications to provide a competitive advantage if we’re all buying from the same vendors?

One argument is that differentiation rests in how we use enterprise applications, rather than in the applications themselves. Think of the manufacturing industries (to use a popular analogy at the moment). If two companies have access to identical factories, then they can still make different, and differentiated, products. Now think of enterprise applications as business process factories. Instead of turning out products, we use these factories to turn out business processes. These digital process factories are very flexible. Even if we all start with the same basic functionality, if I’m smarter at configuring the factory, then I’ll get ahead over time and create a competitive advantage.

This analogy is so general that it’s hard to disagree with. Yes, enterprise applications are (mostly) commodities so any differentiation they might provide now rests in how you use them. However, this is not a simple question of configuration and customization. The problem is a bit more nuanced than that.

Many companies make the mistake that customizing (code changes etc) their unique business processes into an application will provide them with a competitive advantage. Unfortunately the economics of the enterprise software market mean that they are more likely to have created an albatross for their enterprise, than provided a competitive advantage.

Applications are typically parameterized bespoke solutions. (Many of the early enterprise applications were bespoke COBOL solutions where some of the static information—from company name through shop floor configuration—has been pushed into databases as configuration parameters. ) The more configuration parameters provided by the vendor, the more you can bend the application to a shape that suits you.

Each of these configuration parameters requires and investment of time and effort to develop and maintain. They complicate the solution, pushing up its maintenance cost. This leads vendors to try and minimize the number of configuration points they provide to a set of points that will meet most, but not all customers’ needs. In practical terms, it is not possible to configure an application to let you differentiate in a meaningful way. The configuration space is simply too small.

Some companies resort to customizing the application—changing its code—to get their “IP” in. While this might give you a solution reflecting how your business runs today, every customization takes you further from a packaged solution (low cost, easy to maintain, relatively straight forward to upgrade …) and closer to a bespoke solution (high cost, expensive to maintain, difficult or impossible to upgrade). I’ve worked with a number of companies where an application is so heavily customized that it is impossible to deploy vendor patches and/or upgrades. The application that was supposed to help them differentiate had become an expensive burden.

Any advantage to be wrung from enterprise IT now comes from the gaps between applications, not from the applications themselves. Take supply chain for example. Most large businesses have deployed planning and supply chain management solutions, and have been on either the LEAN or Six Sigma journey. Configuring your planning solution slightly differently to your competitors is not going to provide much of an edge, as we’re all using the same algorithms, data models and planning drivers to operate our planning process.

Most of the potential for differentiation now lies with the messier parts of the process, such as exception management (the people who deal with stock-outs and lost or delayed shipments). If I can bring together a work environment that makes my exception managers more productive than yours—responding more rapidly and accurately to exceptions—then I’ve created a competitive advantage as my supply chain is now more agile than yours. If I can capture what it is that my exception managers do, their non-linear and creative problem solving process, automate it, and use this to create time and space for my exception managers to continuously improve how supply chain disruptions are handled, then I’ve created a sustainable competitive advantage. (This is why Enterprise 2.0 is so exciting, since a lot of this IP in this space is tacit information or collaboration.)

Simply configuring an application with today’s best practice—how your company currently does stuff—doesn’t cut it. You need to understand the synergies between your business and the technologies available, and find ways to exploit these synergies. The trick is to understand the 5% that really makes your company different, and then reconfiguring both the business and technology to amplify this advantage while commoditizing the other 95%. Rolls-Royce (appears to be) a great example of getting this right. Starting life as an manufacturer of aircraft engines, Rolls Royce has leveraged its deep understanding of how aircraft engines work (from design through operation and maintenance), reifying this knowledge in a business and IT estate that can provide clients with a service to keep their aircraft moving.

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